


Actuate

by whilst



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Sburb mechanics, Video Game Mechanics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 13:15:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whilst/pseuds/whilst
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Roxy Lalonde becomes Mom as the world prepares to end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Actuate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yukari (M_Peaches)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Peaches/gifts).



> Much thanks to [pressforward](http://archiveofourown.org/users/pressforward) and [snakewife](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Snakewife) for betaing!

She lands in the lake at the start of December when there is no one else around for miles. It hasn't quite frozen over yet, and you stand at the shore as the ice that skimmed its surface vaporizes, even as it splinters with the impact. A clammy mist hangs in the air with the afterimages of burning, and you've always been a strong swimmer, so you take out your boat, and then you take off your dress. You take one last breath and you leap . . .

*

When you were a little girl, you would practice this. The streets would be flooding, buildings burning all around you, and hell was descended from the sky. All of your faceless, virtual-construct neighbors would be scurrying about in terror; everything would come down to you. Only you were a bad enough dude to save the president. Now, you are the only one who can save her. So you do. (You save the bunny too.)

Aw, yiss, Ro-Lal wins the day. You are the hero. It's you.

Except you know that it's her all along. Your Hero of Light, coughing and crying in your arms. In another thirteen years she will be given a name, but you already know that she is your Rose.

As you hold her against the wind, you can no longer deny that this is your life and you are sad and triumphant and cold. Mostly cold. Far too cold to fish out the meteorite she came with, so you leave it to sink to the bottom of the lake.

Everything in the lake dies that day.

When a lake is clear, its water is too cold or too acidic or too depleted of nutrients; when a lake is clear, its waters are hostile. Years later, you will take her walking alongside that lake and tell her about her iron-silicate meteor stork, about the cold, about the clear water still void of all life, and she will critique the subtlety of your metaphor.

*

These early days are full of lessons and you learn them all painfully. So does Rose. At first she seems to cry every hour she isn't asleep. With some experimentation, you narrow the parameters; she only cries any time you come near her.

You take to hovering in doorways and around corners, _see, mommy can be trained too_ , but you can't change a diaper or burp a baby from a room's length away. _Be brave_ , you think, not sure if you mean her or yourself. You take a sip to steel your nerves and smile through your teeth. If she deems your performance acceptable, you are rewarded with her disregard for another handful of hours before the cycle repeats.

Eventually, she gives up on driving you away, or perhaps she grows used to your presence. So long as you are sufficiently intoxicated, you are permitted to hold her in your arms and coo into her hair, just like a real mother-daughter pair. She sleeps soundly through the night – more soundly than you, although you've long out grown sleepwalking – and she doesn't scream at the nightmares. She plays nice with the cats and draws you pictures for the fridge. She smiles through her teeth.

*

You still have field work and you have to travel. You even like it, although the same can't be said for your fellow passengers. Someone, somewhere, should make an action movie about toddlers on planes. Or perhaps it should be a horror flick. Either way, you know of at least one person who would enjoy it. Depending on ironies and ambient infant empathy levels (AIEs), you might even know two.

On site, she will sit with her bunny and watch as you scoop through dirt with your hands and brush dust off your skirt. Your astrophysics degree isn't any less messy than your research in paradoxical generation or dark fenestrology, but it feels cleaner. More real, or at least closer to the reality other people can experience – people who aren't hurled from the sky like comic book superheroes, heralding the end of times. Anyway, it's easier to get funding for meteorite work because members of the board can actually follow your proposals. There is always Skaianet for your more outrageous ventures, but a federal grant is a federal grant.

You convert chunks of rock and ice into their component gases and metals: iron and nickel, nitrogen and helium, signature silicates. Under your hands they become numbers and those numbers become figures and charts and academic papers. 

In the blissfully ignorant dying world – the purported real one – what you learn from the meteorites is your protection. But for you, your work has meant only this: wealth, fear, renown, and your existence as one Dr. Roxy Lalonde, classy lady drunk, as brilliant as she is deadly.

But the numbers say you have to choose. Between Roxy and Mom, you choose Rose. 

The publications provide the resources to purchase a huge-ass custom sculpture for your humble abode upstate. There is a built-in observatory and a secret laboratory near the lake. There is a cheat code to render your liquor cabinet bottomless. You left a city of lights for an empty town with a fairytale name; the least you can claim for compensation is a mansion full of wizards and a bloodstream full of booze.

*

Sometimes you learn more from where the meteors land than from the meteorites themselves. You bring Rose with you when you travel to Washington to collect April's rock, and you both met a real person. Not the one you expect. They are so few and far between on the whole of this good earth that it's a shock to come across him, with his hat and his pipe and his warm introduction. He's not the one you expect. You hesitate, wondering, distracted by his anomalous existence when it solves itself for you.

In the end, you leave without your rock or a single glance back. You tell Harley that you were too late to meet her.

But he never replies.

*

Being alone in an un-instantiated world isn't terrible. You have few neighbors, none of them real, so Rose never needs to wonder about why you are the only adult she ever sees.

Instead she looks inward into the byzantine workings of the mind. She looks outward into the realm of her uneasy sleep. And she looks to you, her smile tightening a little more each year, her eyes narrowing, until all of your actions are imbued with more meaning than you could ever know, and her faith in your love has worn itself so thin that you can see right through it and on the other side is the most fortuitous path. It is as simple as you were drunk, and as cold as a lifeless lake in December.

You give her a princess and a pony and you flood the house with light; you never blink.

*

The game you helped program is released by Skaianet thirteen years after the death of Jane Crocker. It is received with subdued hype and little fanfare at Caer Lalonde. You strife with Rose one final time and set about preparing the house for your guests. The future is but a speck in the sky, hurtling towards your home at 9.8 m/s^2.

When you stop drinking, the lights go out, and you pause your pretend vacuuming affair long enough to flip the switch opening the tunnel to your secret lab where you keep the backup generators and the debris of your backstory and some cats.

The world is burning when you leave it behind.

The water here is warm and salty, and pink shelled consorts scuttle about the beach. They're timid and unhelpful, but they forget you the moment you're out of sight so you doubt they'll tattle. At least they don't get in the way. 

Nothing gets in your way. 

The shore you leave behind is scattered with grist, your back firmly set against the images of carnage, the chalk imps that survived. There is still grit in your shoes and light in your eyes, but your steps are steady and your fists are as fresh and comely as those of any spring maiden of sixteen. Maplehoof whinnies behind you. According to the world map your elite haxors compiled, you are currently in possession of the only boat on a planet that's largely oceans. You don't mean to be followed. And you don't mean to be found. 

Everyone out of your goddamn way. You have a boat full of horse, a fist full of pow, and little girl full of nightmares.


End file.
